Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson and B.C. Premier Christy Clark at the memory wall on the side of the Hudsons Bay building during the next morning aftermath of the Stanley Cup riot in Vancouver, B.C. on June 16, 2011.

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Mayor Gregor Robertson first realized June 15, 2011 would be a dark night after reports flooded in of a Boston fan being pushed to his death outside Rogers Arena and cars going up in flames.

“At that point I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is a nightmare.’”

Robertson was watching the Canucks’ hopes for Stanley Cup glory die when he received reports of unruly fans and mayhem erupting just blocks away from the arena at the Georgia Street live viewing site around 7:30 p.m.

“As the first car was set on fire it was like a free fall those first minutes,” he recalls.

The Boston fan wasn’t shoved off the Georgia viaduct, after all, but he was seriously injured when he fell trying to jump a sizable gap.

Like the “fog of war” experienced by military commanders, the mayor was receiving information from multiple sources and was trying to make sense of the city’s “worst-case scenario” as two separate fronts developed at Granville Street and the Georgia live site.

As the game ended at 7:45 p.m. he immediately retreated with his chief of staff, Mike Magee, to the bowels of the arena. The next two hours were a blur, as he tried to figure out what was happening on the ground by watching TV news coverage and keeping in touch with the police chief, the city manager and the Emergency Operations Centre (EOC) at the eastern end of the city, where authorities were monitoring downtown CCTV and 911 calls as they coordinated a response to the developing riot.

Police, fire, ambulance and staff from the city’s various departments helped juggle the response and relay the latest developments to the mayor from the EOC. He said at the time he felt they were doing the best job possible and was “hoping and praying” that no one would be badly injured or killed.

“That faith gets tested when it looks that bad.”

At 10:30 p.m. he emerged for a press conference outside the arena. Normally unflappable, Robertson was visibly shaken when fielding reporters’ questions about what was happening mere metres away. He repeatedly blamed the riot on a small group of troublemakers and promised they would be held accountable.

He then travelled to the EOC headquarters near Vancouver’s border with Burnaby for a meeting with city police, fire and emergency medical staff.

After the looting and rioting had stopped around 11:40 p.m., Robertson says he toured the downtown core until 3 a.m. “It’s pretty shocking at that point how trashed everything was.”

The next morning he returned downtown to see people from all over the province sweeping, scrubbing and bagging trash on streets where cars had burned and young drunks had brawled and looted just hours earlier.

“People had started to write on the plywood sheets that boarded up windows and this guy, who is on the downtown streets a lot, he said, ‘Mr. Mayor you gotta get some more magic markers for these people,’” Robertson recalls. “So I grabbed a couple people and we ran into London Drugs and we bought all the Sharpies … and markers that they had and went back up and just started handing them out.

“People just started covering those sheets of plywood with their messages to our city, which was an incredible outpouring of emotion and belief in our city.”

Robertson spent the next week meeting with different business owners affected by the riot and helping the city rebound.

He was re-elected that fall after a mayoral campaign in which his rival, former NPA councillor Suzanne Anton, continually attacked Robertson on the riot, blaming him for the city’s lack of planning and for inviting so many people downtown to enjoy Game 7.

A year later, Robertson stands by the response of the authorities that night in preventing any major injuries or deaths. He also prefers to focus on the positivity exhibited by thousands of volunteers who showed up after the riot, helping to “redefine” Vancouver.

“We were lucky that there wasn’t more carnage from that riot,” he says. “That memory from the night and the chaos itself was gut-wrenching and then totally overwhelmed by the response in the days that followed.”

mhager@vancouversun.com

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